Land cover and climate changes drive regionally heterogeneous increases in US insecticide use
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Land cover and climate changes drive regionally heterogeneous increases in US insecticide use Ashley E. Larsen
. Sofie McComb
Received: 10 June 2020 / Accepted: 21 September 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Context Global environmental change is expected to dramatically affect agricultural crop production through a myriad of pathways. One important and thus far poorly understood impact is the effect of land cover and climate change on agricultural insect pests and insecticides. Objectives Here we address the following three questions: (1) how do landscape complexity and weather influence present-day insecticide use, (2) how will changing landscape characteristics and changing climate influence future insecticide use, and how do these effects manifest for different climate and land cover projections? and (3) what are the most important drivers of changing insecticide use? Methods We use panel models applied to countylevel agriculture, land cover, and weather data in the US to understand how landscape composition and configuration, weather, and farm characteristics impact present-day insecticide use. We then leverage forecasted changes in land cover and climate under
different future scenarios to predict insecticide use in 2050. Results We find different future scenarios—through modifications in both landscape and climate conditions—increase the amount of area treated by * 4–20% relative to 2017, with regionally heterogeneous impacts. Of note, we report large farms are more influential than large crop patches and increased winter minimum temperature is more influential than increased summer maximum temperature. However, our results suggest the most important determinants of future insecticide use are crop composition and farm size, variables for which future forecasts are sparse. Conclusions Both landscape and climate change are expected to increase future insecticide use. Yet, crop composition and farm size are highly influential, datapoor variables. Better understanding of future crop composition and farm economics is necessary to effectively predict and mitigate increases in pesticide use. Keywords Climate change Agricultural intensification Landscape simplification Landscape complexity Pest management Pesticides
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-020-01130-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. A. E. Larsen (&) S. McComb Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Landscape Ecol
Introduction Understanding the impacts of global environmental change on crop production is of fundamental importance to food security. As the population increases towards and beyond 9 billion in the coming decades, it is imperative to increase agricultural production with scarce water and land resources. Much research has focused on the direct impacts of glo
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